Your correspondent went through much of his adult life under the impression that visual art – particulary the conceptual kind – was created for brainier folk than he. Too many unfathomable interactive video installations make a body feel like they need a degree in post-everything theory in order to appreciate fuzzy Super 8 loops of someone eating a nectarine through a gas mask.

But three times over the past month I found myself voluntarily visiting the Irish Museum Of Modern Art in Kilmainham. The old Royal Hospital and gardens are a fine place to spend any spring morning (and the downstairs restaurant does a grand lentil soup), but the main attraction is an exhibition by Manchester artist Hughie O’Donoghue, which serves to remind the visitor that great art, like music, need not be explained, merely felt.

O’Donoghue’s paintings reminded me of the first time I saw Francis Bacon’s work: one could almost feel heat emanating from the paint, as though they were radioactive with intensity of emotion. Many of the paintings are based on the Passion, except they’re more akin to Pasolini’s The Gospel According To St. Matthew than Mel Gibson. The tour de force is a vast decade-in-the-making oil on linen painting entitled ‘Blue Crucifixion’, a work so imposing it makes a cathedral of the gallery. The many studies of the cruciform are dignified, restrained and respectful, echoing the great Passion paintings of the ages, from Tintoretto to Goya to Barnett Newman. They evoke all the trauma of the event without the pornography-of-pain elements that often attend modern artists’ depictions of Golgotha.

Another work entitled ‘The Yellow Man’, with its riot of angry blacks and oranges, suggests a coming through fire – not the ennobling of misery, but a process of transfiguration through suffering. Then there are the strangely peaceful ‘Night Sleeper’ studies that show men and women who could be dreaming, or dead, or merely in repose. ‘Flanders and the Narrow Seas’ is a haunting elegy to the martyrdom of soldiers (the artist’s father Daniel fought in the Second World War), and ‘Antabasis’, a 24-part arrangement of sad, enchanted images made from oil on prepared books, reminded this writer of nothing so much as the Floyd’s The Final Cut.

One leaves the Hughie O’Donoghue exhibition with the residual feeling of having visited a strange and terrible and beautiful place, of having been somehow transformed and purified by these holy pictures.

The Hughie O’Donoghue exhibition is at the IMMA until May 17.

Blue notes, Coptic gospel and a bassline you could walk to the moon on.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGqJ3PFRR…

Stuart Evers says nice things about J the R’s dream sequences in today’s Guardian Books Blog.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblo…

Joyce Carol Oates on the life and work of Flannery O’Connor, through the prism of Brad Gooch’s new biography.

 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22532

Eva Plazewska’s review of J the R for www.ohfrancis.com

As a writer for Hot Press magazine and regular contributor to RTE’s The View, Peter Murphy is—no doubt—a man about town on the Dublin scene. Thankfully then, his first novel, John the Revelator, takes you far from this milieu and drops you in some sort of rural Gothic Wexford. Joining John and his mother Lily on Ballo Strand, we enter a story rooted tight in place but adrift in the past fifty years of Irish small-town life. You will go strawberry picking, to the amusements, to the disco. And all the while, signs and portents abound and there is even the suggestion of dark magic.

John is an isolated and strange boy, obsessed with parasites and bedevilled by nightmares. The relationship between himself and his mother forms the hard knot at the novel’s centre but the story grows only as this is increasingly unravelled by outside influences. Until the arrival of Jamey Corboy, the reader may as well be in the 1950’s Ireland of John Broderick’s novels: a claustrophobic and damp place harbouring a parochial distrust of difference. The new boy brings John up to speed on such new-fangled concepts as attractive mothers, African immigrants and the works of Rimbaud. The teenagers form a mismatched friendship, with John the mammy’s boy bumpkin and Jamey the townie sophisticate. But it is John who leads them into trouble the night they desecrate the chapel and Jamey who takes the fall.

As Jamey educates John in the ways of the world, the sickly Lily withdraws. In her weakness she allows her friend Mrs. Nagle to take control of the household. Though she espouses a purse-lipped Christian morality, Mrs. Nagle’s presence hints at witchiness, at voodoo. As Lily shrinks to skin and bone, her friend grows larger and more sinister. But as with John’s prophetic dreams, Mrs. Nagle’s ‘true nature’ remains obscured. Murphy has a deft touch when it comes to the mystical: it is a powerful undercurrent that never swamps the story yet lurks always in the corner of the eye, threatening.

Indeed, the revelatory promise of the novel’s title is never brought to fruition. As in life and the better kind of art, you are left to your own conclusions. This is a stark novel: you feel the damp and the cold in Lily’s house, you see the wild grey sea that churns and drowns on those long Wexford beaches. Reading this novel, you get yourself stuck for a while in a strange corner of Ireland, one which may well boast an Afro-Caribbean food store but remains in thrall to the Mrs. Nagles of the world.

But for all the cold uncaringness this landscape describes, there is humanity in the characters, who strike true in their awkwardness, their unpredictability and their willingness to forgive each other their trespasses. John the Revelator is not a rock ‘n’ roll novel by any means but this little book has a quiet power. It will stick to your bones long after the read is done.

“I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but
since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words
what the pure music would have done better.” – William Faulkner

We are not worthy:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_nwAkOGL…

Your starter for ten: how do Mogwai, five unassuming blokes from Glasgow, produce such an epic, expansive, end-times sound roughly halfway between Sonic Youth and Sergio Leone?

“I don’t know!” laughs multi-instrumentalist founder member Stuart Braithwaite, on the phone from Orleans in France. “ It’s quite strange, I don’t think the music reflects us particularly as people, because it’s quite sombre, and we’re not at all like that. It’s something subconscious. I think some of our music sounds Scottish, it has a real pentatonic sadness about it.

“But I think the city of Glasgow has affected us more culturally, being in a place where there’s a lot of talented people around, always things happening. Glasgow’s got a bit of an edge as well, so it’s not as if it’s full of posers or anything. I was talking to the crime writer Ian Rankin about this, how he spends his days writing about these really horrific, violent, grisly incidents, and he’s the most affable person you’ve ever met. I think maybe people look toward what isn’t in their everyday make-up to inspire them.”

Mogwai’s latest album The Hawk Is Howling might just be their best, a stunning, slow-motion extinction level event of a record. The title might suggest Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, but as Stuart explains, its origins were a little more rock ‘n’ roll.

“We were listening to the radio,” he recalls, “Simo Mayo was interviewing Ray Manzarek from The Doors on Radio 5, and he was describing Chicago, and I think he got his words confused, he said, “In Chicago the hawk is howling,” and I think he meant that the wind was howling, so that struck our tiny Scottish minds as being a very amusing phrase.”

It also leads rather logically into the album’s majestic opener ‘I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead’.

“No, that was something totally different, I think Dominic (Aitchison) said that, and we just thought that was funny. That was more nonsense art than found art!”

So in the absence of lyrics, how important are titles in terms of setting the tone for a piece of music?

“I don’t think they’re that important at all – I’d say the only position they really have is in our strive against pretentiousness, because they are quite ridiculous and trashy, they’re certainly not in the same tone as the actual songs, so I think we probably use them to make sure everybody knows we’re not stuck up our own arses. I think our music’s quite basic and uncontrived. We’re not virtuosos or anything. Not to say we’re purposely not virtuosos – we just don’t have the talent!”

I would dispute that. An integral component of virtuosity is taste, something Mogwai have in abundance. It’s hard to figure if the quintet’s music is tragic or exultant or both, but one imagines it’s cathartic as hell to play live.

“It is. If I’ve had an unsatisfying or bad day, I really look forward to playing, because when it goes well you get lost in the noise and stuff.”

So, songs like ‘Batcat’ are simulatneously violent and poetic – one could easily imagine Mogwai scoring an alternative Raging Bull. In fact, the band are no strangers to film soundtracks, having provided the music for Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait, Douglas Gordon and Pilippe Parreno’s 17-camera real-time documentary about French footballer Zinedine Zidane’s performance in the 2005 Spanish Liga Real Madrid versus Villareal CF game.

“With Zidane we used two songs that were already written that hadn’t settled on old records,” Stuart explains, “and the rest were really written on the spot, we did pretty much what Neil Young did (on Dead Man) I imagine, we’d just play until something sounded good, and then just play along watching the film. We recorded and mixed the whole thing in two weeks, which was pretty fast for us. It’s amazing the inspiring power of a deadline! I’m sure it’s the same with the writing as well.”

No kidding – raw fear as creative laxative.

“Yeah, it’s scary, you need to get it done, you don’t want to turn up without your homework, so you just put that bit of extra effort in. Normally if you’re thinking and playing and writing on the run, you do something pretty good. As long as you care.”

Mogwai play the Academy in Dublin on March 20, 21 and 22. The Hawk Is Howling is out now on PIAS.

Joe Gideon & the Shark
Harum Scarum
(Bella Union)

An extraordinary debut arrives just as spring begins to bite. Former members of Bikini Atoll, Joe Gideon and his sister Viva generate a guttural electric blues (‘Harum Scarum’, ‘Johan Was A Painter And An Arsonist’, ‘DOL’), but when they cast aside the Cramps/Blues Explosion/Gallon Drunk inclinations and embrace an unlikely kind of soul music, the duo really soar.

The album’s four or five talking blues story-songs, rendered in Gideon’s rough, compelling and somewhat Antipodean tones, are nothing less than stellar. Exhibit A, the driving vision-quest monologue ‘Civilization’, in which the protagonist leaves the flat earth reality of his home in order to learn the ways of man (“I was a writer, a musician, a fishmonger, a politician/I went all spastic like Lars von Trier /Wrote a book which was a spectacular success/Spent all my earnings on weed and crystal meth”). Upon returning from his odyssey, our pilgrim discharges the sum total of his distilled wisdoms for the benefit of his family: “The circumference of a circle is twice the diameter within/The centre of which the universe begins/The radius is like your aura which around you glows/The proton and the neutron know which way to go.”

There’s plenty more where that came from, including ‘Hide And Seek’, which depicts the Darwinian laws of the playground and the birthday party in vivid detail, and a testimonial for ‘Kathy Ray’, which may or may not be the true hard luck story of a backing singer who once auditioned for Ray Charles, played Live Aid with Eurythmics, and was half-blinded by her boyfriend – tragic, rousing and redemptive all at once.

But the true masterpiece is the penultimate seven minute epic ‘Anything You Love That Much You Will See Again’, halfway between the Dirty Three and Dylan, a post industrial gospel homily dressed in a leather suit and cuban heels, preaching psalms of hope and rebirth in the face of heartbreak. Righteous.

The first edition of John Kelly’s Radio Clash will be repeated on RTE Radio 2XFM this evening at 7pm.
Check out the playlist:

Asie Payton/Go Gittas Camp – Ooh Baby
Tom Waits – Big In Japan
The Clash – Magnificent 7
BushTetras – You Can’t Be Funky
23 Skidoo – Coup
LKJ – Want Fi Goh Rave
In Crowd – mango Walk
Lee Perry & The Upsetters – Grumblin’ Dub
Junior Murvin – Roots Train
Big Audio Dynamite – E-Mc2
PIL – This Is Not A Love Song
Stooges – I wanna Be Your Dog
Velvet Underground – I’m Waiting For The man
Vince Taylor – Brand New Cadillac
Lloyd Price – Stagger lee